Abstract
Calvino’s Invisible Cities offers an exceptional precedent for what I call “peripheral visions” of both cities and empires. After sketching the temporal and spatial paradoxes and puzzles of both urbanity and empire that Calvino proposes, I apply his mode of writing to three post-imperial cities in southeast Europe: Zagreb, Belgrade, and Sarajevo. Like the cities of Kublai Khan’s empire, these cities invite and reward peripheral visions.
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Notes
- 1.
For a distinct yet overlapping invocation of the concept-metaphor “peripheral vision,” see Lisa Wedeen’s Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power and Performance in Yemen (2008).
- 2.
- 3.
This endeavor resonates with what I elsewhere have called the method of textured historicity: “a mode of scholarship and knowledge [that] emphasizes the distinctive, embodied encounter between the subject in the present and the objects that convey the past in the present” (Walton 2019b, 357).
- 4.
Silahdar Damat Ali Pasha’s mausoleum (türbe) has pride of place within Kalemegdan, Belgrade’s massive citadel overlooking the confluence of the Danube and the Sava. It was recently restored with financial assistance from Turkey.
- 5.
As the artist, writer, and humorist Momo Kapor quips, “Belgrade is the best place in the world where to catch a bus for Zemun” (Kapor 2008, 49).
- 6.
For a trenchant critique of the redevelopment of the Savamala neighborhood, see the documentary film Waterfront: A post-Ottoman, post-socialist story (KURS and Jovanović 2018).
- 7.
The term merak made its way to Bosnian from Turkish, but its connotations are different in Turkish: rather than pleasure, it means curiosity or concern. Merak is also closely related to another term derived from Turkish, čejf (Turkish: keyif), which means pleasure or enjoyment in both languages. Engin Işın (2010) offers a provocative reading of keyif as a distinctive “affect” of Istanbul, one that contrasts with Orhan Pamuk’s (2003) famous invocation of the constitutive hüzün, or collective melancholy, of the former Ottoman capital.
- 8.
As Maximilian Hartmuth pointedly writes, “Thereby, paradoxically, Sarajevo’s oriental quality was expressed with a structure that was not built under Ottoman but Habsburg rule!” (2015, 174).
- 9.
I am indebted to Kevin Kenjar for suggesting the extension of the onions-and-squash metaphor with a reference to bosanski lonac.
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Acknowledgments
My thanks to Annika Kirbis and Robert Walton for kindly offering comments on earlier versions of this essay. Kevin Kenjar and Jelena Radovanović graciously offered me their expertise and insights on Sarajevo and Belgrade, respectively. Their guidance was indispensable.
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Walton, J.F. (2022). Peripheral Visions of Empire: Zagreb, Belgrade, Sarajevo (Homage to Calvino). In: Linder, B. (eds) "Invisible Cities" and the Urban Imagination. Literary Urban Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13048-9_23
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